I work for a software dev company that uses and advocates for Microsoft’s platform. Many of the solutions we’ve sold and/or suggested to our customers have been based on our internal use of the same platforms and feature levels which we use to dogfood and demo the product we develop.

Some features or solutions we’ve developed for our customers are reliant on our exposure to Microsoft products we would not be able to justify or afford outside the partner program. If the partner program had not been available those solutions would have been based off alternative products, most likely open source.

The most likely jump we would have made already is from SQL Server to Postgres. In that instance alone, the SQL Server licenses our product/solution has led our customers to make far exceeds our IUR usage.

I can’t imagine we’re alone in the scenario. There is no way our small company could justify purchasing the enterprise licenses we routinely suggest our customers purchase.